“No, It’s Not Your
Medical Practice”

Medical practice is a business, which will
not succeed
by your efforts alone.

Just take a close look. Your medical
practice would not exist without the team
effort of every employee you hired to work
on a job you either don’t have the time
to
do yourself or may be areas which you
couldn’t ever efficiently do yourself.

By the
time you’ve finished medical school, like many
graduates, you have that confidence, motivation, and
determination to make your pistons pop in an effort to
satisfy your synaptic inclination to do everything
yourself. After all, if you managed to finish medical
school there’s nothing you can’t do—right?

One of the
most significant causes of medical practice failure
comes from the
total mental inability to understand
that the medical practice business is a team
effort
from start to finish. Physicians, or any other
professional, who make the assumption their position
is to dictate to their office staff exactly what they
must do every day will pave the way to repeated hiring
and
firing employees.

That leaves a huge footprint in
the local medical community which will
persist indefinitely.

Eventually, that doctor will not only find it very
difficult to find new employees who are willing to
work for “a dictator,” but also will quickly discover
that those
who are willing to work for them are often
desperate individuals who will
disrupt
the practice.

I received
an email recently from a young office employee who was
at the end
of her rope trying to decide what to do
about what the physical therapist boss was requiring
her to do in the business and which she knew nothing
about. She had
been hired the year prior to do a
receptionist job.

Over the past year the physical
therapist kept piling on new job functions for her to
do, certainly to avoid the cost of hiring another
employee. She needed the job
so complied as best she
could. She described him as very arrogant, purposely
intimidating, self braggart, know-it-all, and highly
critical of other physical
therapists in
the area.

The final
straw came when the therapist noticed that the medical
community
was no longer referring patients to him.
His response to that was to require this employee to
personally go to each physician’s office and find out
why the doctors were no longer sending him patients.
She was told to do it and was given no instructions
how to approach the doctors with
such a quest.

After
visiting a few doctor’s offices in her unprepared
fashion, she was
humiliated by the process and
discovered what we as physicians already
understand—“If the physical therapist has no insight
about what he was doing to destroy physician
referrals, then providing any response to the young
lady’s
request
served
no purpose.”

She quit
the job, was much happier in her new office job, and
had learned the need to also interview the interviewer
in the future. Do you believe the therapist would
ever understand why he kept shooting himself in the
foot? Usually,
they
never do.

This real
life example of a professional is a clear
demonstration of how the lack
of knowledge about
teamwork in running a business is the cornerstone of
success
of any business.

The basis
for having a medical office business team approach

Your
ultimate goals for your medical practice will not
be reached without a team to accomplish each of the
medical practice business needs. Do you have a
goal
beyond making an adequate income and staying in
medical practice for a
while? If so, your mental
fulfillment will not be in your destinyat least from
a professional point of view.

A few goals like
providing income to fund your retirement plan, put
your youngsters through college, and have the
lifestyle commensurate with your status are in the
master plans of
most physicians.

You
want to build an organization that runs on auto-pilot.
The quality of people you hire will ultimately
determine how quickly this happens. At the
beginning,
this team will most likely be you, your receptionist,
your back office person, and a bookkeeper. As you
grow your practice, leveraging people and time will be
a crucial and a necessary component of
your success.

You will find that time will become more scarce and
therefore much more valuable. Relying on your team to
free up your time to see patients, practice medicine,
and increase your income, is
just the first step.

Certain
people will bring in their own expertise and talents
to your business which are unique to your business
and that need to be implemented into the team effort
and goals like putting a puzzle together. Giving
these employees an opportunity to “strut their stuff”
empowers their self-esteem, confidence, and
creativity. These are things you rarely find outside
of team efforts.

Teams
provide coordinated functions which makes the business
run smoothly and efficiently. When one member
performs a function, all the
members of the team know
what it is and how they can fit it into their own
tasks. Each benefits from the work and ideas of the
other team members. Do you think a quarterback could
ever throw a completed pass unless he had good linemen
to
protect him—or a hat trick in hockey—or a triple
play in baseball?

What’s your
role in this medical office business team?

Early on
your role will be quite different than a few years
later in your medical practice. In the beginning you
probably will be doing most everything yourself—unless
you have lots of moolah to hire a bunch of employees
to start with.

As your business and team grows you
will be handing off the less important business jobs
to various team members and working yourself up the
corporate
ladder to CEO of your
business empire.

Recognize that you are an entrepreneur? By
definition, you are a person
who creates a business or
organization and is responsible for the management and
growth of the business at significant risk to yourself
and commitment to
your employees.

Traveling to the
higher ground has its price in time commitment and
problem management. And that, young doctor, may
amount to more than you bargained for. However, if
you have decided that it’s worth the effort to insure
your medical
practice success, then you
will succeed.

You are in
charge of everything to start with. Extra time must
be spent teaching each member of your office team what
they are responsible for, how to do it your way, and
then follow them along to see that they are able to
handle the job efficiently. When an office staffer
can’t, you have to give them the knowledge
how to
improve, or replace them.

You must
have a commitment to yourself you are willing to
terminate their employment regardless of their
pleasant attributes, their willingness to work hard,
and their friendship with other staff members.

If
they can’t think quick, learn quickly, and show
efficiency and creativity in
their work, you have to
replace them. No physician likes terminating a staff
member that they like—but it has to be done. Your
business requires efficiency,
not just a
pleasant personality.

It’s
always beneficial to support your thoughts and beliefs
about the positive results of coaching your office
team. Ask your associates in practice if they would
be willing to give you their advice about how they
create efficiency in their practice. What have they
done to be able to see 50 patients a day in the
office, while you're barely able see 30 patients?

You
know the rule---the more patients you see the more
money you make. Often, you’ll find that they have
office meetings to discuss what improvements are
needed or send office staff to educational meetings
and seminars.

Isn’t it
obvious to you that a well oiled office machine will
return more rewards than the disjointed, intermittent
and non-productive attempts to spend time only
on
reacting to business problems and their solutions
rather than focusing on preventing those in the first
place using a team that’s coordinated and pulling in
the
same direction?

A team
effort in any business always results in ten times
the productivity.

Article #5A

ARTICLE---DAN
KENNEDY

Why People Fail

A series of No B.S. Articles from Dan
Kennedy

"Will 'The Secret Millionaire' Arrive At Your Door?"Not If You’re Sitting Around Waiting
For Him

A new TV program, loosely swiped from a TV show of long
ago, debuts tonight on Fox.As I understand it, in “The
Secret Millionaire” we will see millionaires go
undercover, work for a week in some poorly paid job
and live as the oppressed workers and economically
troubled live. The millionaires will find one of the
downtrodden they meet especially worthy and, revealing
themselves as “secret millionaires,” will whip out
their checkbooks and give the deserving individual big
bundles of money. It’s sort of a privatized bailout.

It’ll be exciting, like Oprah gifting cars. People will
cry, just like on the home make-over show, where they
give people remodeling jobs or entire homes for free.
On the surface, there’s nothing seriously wrong with
it, and its clever television, especially now. It
does, as I said, borrow from a TV show of decades
back, when a millionaire arrived as a surprise on a
doorstep.

Secret Millionaire” even borrows a bit from the ancient
“Queen For a Day” show – because that’s all it is:
like lottery winnings, most entirely unearned
windfalls disappear “in a day,” leaving behind more
harm done than good. “Give a man a fish, feed him for
a day. Teach a man to fish” – and require that he go
fish – “feed him
for life.”

Therein is the problem. In “Secret Millionaire” we can
see TV reflecting and reinforcing societal and
political trends that put us all in peril.

This is basically a game show with no game. Most game
shows still require some skill, and contestants
actually prepare by drilling in advance for
‘Jeopardy,’ orgetting
into fit shape for ‘Survivor,’ or rehearsing for
‘American Idol.’ The tireless ‘Wheel Of Fortune’
requires you know the difference between vowel and
consonant. On NBC’s wildly popular “Deal or No Deal,”
they wisely eliminated all requirements of knowinganythingor havingany skills; you need
only guess the right suitcase and be able to tolerate
Howie Mandel to win a million dollars.

But “Secret Millionaire” goes a step further. It asks
nothing and hands out money for free. It asks for no
special preparation, effort, skill or talent in
advance. And of course, it asks for nothing in return.

As such, the show reinforces the dangerous idea so
harmful to the working poor that simply because they
are working poor, they deserve to have somebody hand
them a bunch of money. They need only and hope for
such an occurrence. Even better, the money is
transferred to them from the rich, who have too much
of it.

Fox missed
something here that would have made the show much more
popular. The secret millionaires should be ripped from
their mansions and office penthouses by force and
compelled to play, their money taken from them
involuntarily. But even as is, we shouldn’t miss the
point that it could be called ‘The Re-Distribution Of
Wealth Show.’

Now, here’s what youwon’tsee on any major network: A
show where “The Secret Millionaire” rewards people
based on their productivity and investment of time and
effort. Nobody doles out cash to those who have worked
hard, educated themselves, scrimped and saved,
responsibly bought homes and cars they could afford,
started and built businesses, and created employment
opportunities for others.

Nor will you see a show called “The Self-Made Main Street
Millionaire” about people who have started with
nothing or less than nothing and made fortunes through
relatively ordinary small businesses and prudent
financial behavior over time. There are far, far, far
more of those than there are Paris Hiltons, A-Rods and
Wall
Street types.

You won’t see this not just because no one would watch,
but because it’s reality TV that would contradict the
philosophical belief the media folks hold dear and the
ideas they wish to sell: Pulling oneself up by
bootstraps is passé and freakish and no longer
practical in today’s America. The Have’s only have by
luck and theft and have too much. And the Have-Nots
can only be
helped by hand-outs.

The WHY PEOPLE FAIL articles are provided by Dan S.
Kennedy, serial entrepreneur, from-scratch
multi-millionaire, speaker, consultant, coach, author
of 13 books including the No B.S. series (www.NoBSBooks.com),
and editor of The No B.S. Marketing Letter. WE HAVE
ARRANGED A SPECIAL FREE GIFT FROM DAN FOR YOU
including a 2-Month Free Membership in Glazer-Kennedy
Insider’s Circle, newsletters, audio CD’s and more:
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